Hazard Tropical Cyclone and Severe Wind

An amazing looking super cell storm cloud forming on the east coast of Queensland, Australia.
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Geoscience Australia’s Community Safety team supports Australia’s ability to manage the impact of tropical cyclones and severe wind, and helps inform decisions about risk.

We contribute to each stage of the emergency management cycle to help improve preparedness, response and recovery with our focus on contributing towards community safety.

Aerial image depicting satellite data that shows cyclonic cloud formations moving across from the Pacific Ocean over Queensland Australia.

Our role

To help understand what could be at threat from tropical cyclones, we provide exposure information about buildings, demographics, community infrastructure and agricultural commodities.

We also provide around the clock access to data about people, property and infrastructure potentially exposed during an event. Our information aids in providing an understanding of a tropical cyclone situation to targeted preparedness, response and recovery efforts.

We develop national-scale tropical cyclone wind hazard assessments of severe events to evaluate the likelihood and magnitude of tropical cyclone events.

Our local impact models provide vital information to help communities plan for and reduce the impacts from the threat of tropical cyclones.

We provide data that helps evaluate local wind speeds over topography and different land cover types and house over 160,000 plausible future tropical cyclone scenarios that can be used in cyclone risk management and planning.

Our Hazard Impact Assessment brings together hazard, exposure and vulnerability data in one piece of software to calculate damage caused by a natural hazard.

These products, tools and data provide better understanding of hazard vulnerabilities for all sectors to plan, prepare and reduce exposure to natural hazards improving preparedness now and into the future.

Emerging capabilities

We engage with different sectors to provide assessments and address new challenges as they emerge.

  • Our Researchers are committed to growing our knowledge base to prepare for challenges of the future.

  • We have a strong attendance at conferences and events to maintain awareness of the challenges faced by the community safety sector and keep up to date with latest science.

  • Our open-source data is accessed by developers interested in solving operational challenges of reducing vulnerability and exposure to hazards.

An amazing looking super cell storm cloud forming on the east coast of Queensland, Australia.

Case study Partnering with QFES for tropical cyclone hazard assessment

How science and data were combined to help Queensland’s emergency managers plan for and reduce the impacts of tropical cyclone hazards.

Matt Chesnais

By implementing these modelling techniques and using realistic scenarios, QFES will be able to more effectively engage with the community to address the risks from extreme wind hazards like tropical cyclones. 

Matt Chesnais

Manager of the QFES Hazard and Risk Unit